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Food preparation woes
This time, the "meat" in "meatspace" is literally, meat. Well, part of it. I suck at preparing food. And doing dishes. And my sink is small and my fridge is a half-size fridge.
I'd recently come up with a way of dealing with this, with only a rice cooker (and thus a makeshift hot plate): boil veggies, then cook pasta or rice in the resulting veggie-water. Add protein later--either precooked meat or cheese. I'd just spent several hours a couple days ago making like five medium-sized tupperware containers worth of pasta and five of various veggies (peppers, celery, mushrooms, and baby carrots).
So this was my immediate next few days worth of meals: put about 3/4 containers of pasta in a (ceramic) bowl, then half to a full container of veggies into the bowl, and add cheese liberally, and/or a few Ikea meatballs. Put in microwave, nuke for a few minutes. Voila, a meal in five minutes.
This formula kept (quarantined?) all grease away from plastic containers. If you've ever had to wash plastic containers that have held greasy food, you know what I mean. They're gawdawfully difficult to wash clean of grease. I have dry skin; washing grease-laced plastic makes it worse.
So, out of the blue, my parents decide to come visit me for the weekend. They bring a crockpot. Here's their idea:
1. I can dump all my food in there, and keep it heating all day long, and then come home to a warm meal or wake up to one or whatever.
2. I shouldn't ever have to wash it anyway.
Wait, really? I doubt I can keep the same pot of food, rotating through various contents, for more than a week or so, before I become highly suspicious something in there might not be good for human consumption anymore.
And on top of that, keeping something running at 200 watts for an entire day is...a bit of a waste.
But my mom insists, saying, let her show me once. Okay, fine.
In goes various veggies, some pork chops, and probably some oil. (Or maybe it's from the meat.) Well there goes my willingness to bring it with me to school in a plastic container. Okay. And then she goes and uses up some of my frozen veggies. In fact, she goes and uses up over half of it. (Well, actually, she used the frozen veggies for the previous meal which was prepared using the rice cooker, but, still, I don't have them anymore. In her defence, though, the frozen brussels sprouts didn't taste slightly suspect.)
But damnit, that was my backup. In case I'm too lazy or tired to buy veggies, so I still get enough fiber in my diet.
She also goes and buys some meat. I have like no experience preparing meat, because the fucking college I went to forced me to be part of a meal plan rather than forcing me to be on my own and learn how to make my own meals. And when I'd ask my mom to just let me have at it, she'd always insist on either (1) handholding me every step of the way (which was both frustrating and not conducive to me realizing what problems there are and then figuring out how the solutions served them) or (2) telling me that it's just more efficient for her to do it herself.
Well, so I go and put the few chicken tenders into plastic bags destined for the freezer. But not before I leave behind a trail of possibly-tainted-with-raw-meat water everywhere, because of stupid mistakes like forgetting that my bags were wet before moving them to the freezer. This was followed by copious amounts of soap and detergent and some wiping up the floor by hand (I don't have a mop but it's easier this way anyway).
She also goes and buys me a slightly-on-the-small-size head of cabbage. Well, I can just stick everything in the crock-pot, right? So I proceed to peel apart the cabbage while it's still fresh (can avoid junking the outermost leaf) and washing it and I dump it--all of it--into the half-full crockpot which still has food from last night.
Turns out the crockpot can't hold everything...well, I can put the lid on it, but it's still a peak distance of a centimeter off the rim of the actual pot.
She also bought me some spare ribs, cut into bite-sized portions. She fixed them really, really deliciously. I don't know how to do that. I could throw them all in the crockpot, which is what she suggested...except now I don't have space. So I had to go make room in my already-stuffed fridge (from other stuff we bought at the store) just to put the spare rib chunks. Well, they're not cut into bite-sized portions yet...they're more like, cut into chains of bit-sized portions.
And now I can cut up the chains and then boil them and the excess veggies in my rice cooker, and make semi-short work of that, or I can wait for the crockpot.
I can go take a shower first, but after I take a shower my hands will be even drier or covered in grease from vaseline themselves...oh, who am I kidding, it doesn't make a bit of difference, the fucks are inert.
I've had "For Fruits Basket" playing on loop for a few hours now and I'm still not completely calm.
This crockpot will be put away once this stew is finished. Which is going to take a couple days or so. And I'll go back to buying up various veggies, boiling them together, using the water to cook rice or pasta, and repeating this several times in a row, probably one every four to seven days. It's bland, but it gets the job done. And I better finish that two-pound bag of shredded cheese quickly.
Oh, the meat in the freezer? I can put it on a steamer in the rice cooker if I want some more variety. Something like that. Add salt, pepper, or soy sauce to taste, whatever that means.
Then, after preparing, add salt, pepper, soy sauce, olive oil, potato chips, and/or cheese to taste.
...sigh.
Now I know why Chihaya just buys frozen meals...
Comments
Finally fixed the pork.
OH GOSH IT WAS FATTY.
Before this, I took out a bunch of the mostly-but-not-fully-cooked-because-it-wasn't-submerged-and-slightly-burnt-where-it-touched-the-edges-of-the-pot-without-being-submerged cabbage.
So I started cutting the pork. I've cut chicken before, but I wasn't prepared for the tendons/ligaments/pully-thingies-that-are-just-an-ass-to-cut. Not to mention that the strips were too long to fit on my little cutting board. Okay, so I basically had them hanging like a bridge between the styrofoam container and the cutting board. Occasional extra flaps of meat were just icing on the cake of annoyance.
Once I was done I had two larger bowls half-filled with pork. Put them into the crockpot, and...they didn't all fit beneath the water. Well, I just piled them on anyway, and thankfully, they fit beneath the lid. I'm going to simply hope that they
Now came the fun part...washing this stuff. I was not prepared for just how grease-laden my plastic cutting board was. It took the big guns--several squirts of detergent, hot water, and vigorous scrubbing--to get it off. And this time I didn't even bother with washing the styrofoam plate (which I did for the chicken). I just trashed it (as opposed to recycling it).
Then I had to clean off, like, everything. Between memory of a dorm floormate's moldy meat-fight clothes and not actually knowing how unclean I can allow stuff to be, I opted to soap-cloth basically the entire area around the sink, and then wipe everything back down. I'm almost certain I'm overdoing it, but...since I wasn't sure I might as well do it.
Maybe this is why Muslims avoid pork.
...Damn man, you need to learn how to cook
Also, cleaning greasy plastic isn't hard what the hell are you doing that makes it hard?
I don't know. All I know is that if I have greasy food in tupperware, one light pass of a scrubbing-brush with detergent isn't enough to make it grease-free to the touch; I need to scrub it a bit, or more depending on how greasy it was.
Do you soak dishes at all?
I have a tiny sink. Though maybe I should consider that...